


Purple

by fairietailed



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Galra Keith (Voltron), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 03:26:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8040664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairietailed/pseuds/fairietailed
Summary: You remember a few months ago when Allura had brought the castle into the orbit of one of the outer planets of some galaxy you hadn’t bothered learning the name of. The planets had orbited a sun that was the same color as the sunflowers you’d missed from home.
You think that Keith’s eyes mirror the sun from that galaxy -- they stare you down with an intensity that could burn you if exposed for too long.--"You were the one thing I never lied about."





	Purple

**Author's Note:**

> I'm only a little bit sorry.

The hallway is silent save for you; your footfalls loud as gunshots on the tile as you run.

Everything is purple.

Galra purple.

The walls, the lights that line the floor-

_ Keith _ .

You trip, stumbling over your own feet, barely able to catch yourself as you fall forward. You feel your helmet slam into the tile, hard enough that you’d be surprised if it didn’t crack. You wheeze a bit in pain as you push yourself up, wrapping one arm around your bruised torso before fully pulling yourself off of the floor. You stagger once, twice, and then you’re jogging -- you’re not running as fast as you were before, but it’s not like it matters. It’s not like you have anywhere to go.

You hear humming behind you, hear a nail running along the wall of the hallway, and you almost throw up.

You round a corner, sliding to a stop in front of the training room. You slip inside, locking the door behind you, praying that the controls haven’t been entirely hacked yet. You pray the lock will hold.

You pray that everyone else is alright.

You collapse, wheezing, sliding backward on the floor until you’re a good ten feet away from the door. You pull out your bayard, positioning it so it’s aimed at the entryway.

You ignore the fact that you would never be able to use it.

The humming grows louder, the tune nearly falling in time with the heartbeat that’s roaring in your ears. You wonder if maybe he can hear your heartbeat from where he is, and wonders if maybe that’s why he’s so excited.

The humming stops.

You hold your breath, gripping your bayard a bit tighter, pushing down the stinging in your eyes and the lump in your throat. You can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t focus on anything other than the fact that this is like some horrible, cliche horror movie that you had seen once on Earth with your sisters. You remember making fun of the protagonist, remember laughing about how there was no escape for her. You had laughed when the end credits had rolled after the character’s screams, calling it lame and pathetic and saying that you could have definitely handled yourself, if you were in the same situation. You had laughed, and tackled one of your sisters and heard her scream just as loudly.

You aren’t laughing now.

You will probably never see your sisters again.

You’re in the same situation as the damsel, and you’re not handling yourself much better.

You can hear a set of fingernails trail down the training room door.

You can’t breathe.

You’re going to die.

“Lance?”

Your heart drops through the floor.

“Lance, please,” the voice is pleading, panicked, and for a second it sounds nearly identical to the real thing. “Please let me in. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know where the others are, and I need you to help me. Please? Just- just let me in, okay? It’s me, I swear.”

The silence that stretches between you is deafening. You hear a sigh, followed by another tap on the door. You can practically hear him smiling, can practically hear the switch flip as he changes his tactics.

“Lance~” the voice tries again, drawing your name out and practically cooing. It doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t sound like the person it belongs to. It’s cold, distant. You choke on a sob.

“Open the door, baby,” the voice says, and you grit your teeth. There’s a hum on the other side of the door. “I want to see you. Let me in, yeah? I won’t hurt you.”

The sob that rips through your chest nearly breaks you in half. The voice on the other side of the door laughs.

“Why are you crying?”

The nails run down the door again, this time hovering over the lock on the other side. You hold your breath, your chest constricting. You couldn’t move even if you wanted to.

There’s a beep, a click, and the door opens.

Keith stands on the other side of the door, shock and amusement pulling his face into a twisted smirk. His ears twitch, and his hand hovers over the control panel.

You know, though, that this person isn’t Keith.

He’s purple, with yellow eyes and ears that are big and fluffy and twitch with every sound he thinks he might hear. He wears a grin that you’d never seen  _ your _ Keith wear before. It’s cold, calculating, and it never seems to disappear. You had never thought that you’d wish for Keith to stop smiling.

“Oh!” He says, flicking his eyes in your direction. He holds up his hand, as if it were a key. “I guess it still reads me as a Paladin. Maybe even as a human. Isn’t that interesting?”

He moves to step into the room, and you lift your bayard, the barrel of your gun pointed at his chest. He clicks his tongue.

“Lance, we both know you won’t use that thing.”

You set off a warning shot at his feet to call his bluff.

(Though part of it is to call your own.)

He steps back, arms raised, looking slightly impressed. His ears twitch again, and he scratches behind one of them. He stretches, raising his arms over his head, and proceeds to sit down across from you. He crosses his legs under him, a total image of relaxation.

“Lance,” he starts, and you frown. He ignores you. “We both know that this won’t end well for you. So just... Give up now, okay? It’s not like I really want to hurt  _ you _ .”

You can hear the emphasis, seemingly dropped in the wrong place. You finally find your voice.

“Me?”

Keith nods. “Mm. You.”

“And the others?”

“What about them?”

Your frown deepens. “You didn’t give a shit about them, did you?”

Keith tilts his head, his eyes growing wide with question.

You remember a few months ago when Allura had brought the castle into the orbit of one of the outer planets of some galaxy you hadn’t bothered learning the name of. The planets had orbited a sun that was the same color as the sunflowers you’d missed from home.

You think that Keith’s eyes mirror the sun from that galaxy -- they stare you down with an intensity that could burn you if exposed for too long.

One of his ears twitches for a third time. You wonder what he hears.

“Why would I?”

Your stomach lurches, and you aren’t sure whether it’s from anger or the idea that Keith may have hurt the others beyond what a healing pod could fix. You adjust your gun, raising it a bit higher up. Your ribs scream at you in protest, but you ignore it.

“Because they were your family.”

Keith hums, clasping his ankles and giving you a look of amusement. “They weren’t, though. I don’t have a family, and that’s okay with me.”

“What about Shiro?”

“You keep acting as if just asking about them is going to change my opinion on things.”

You let the anger within you flare, sitting up a bit straighter. “Shut the fuck up! You cared about Shiro. You went through all that trouble of rescuing him-”

Keith holds up a finger, a small smile creeping across his face, and cuts you off.

“I rescued Champion. We couldn’t afford to lose him, or the arm that Haggar gave him.” You choke, he continues. “I was supposed to keep an eye on him. On all of you, really. Until the timing was right.”

“But you fought Sendak, and Zarkon-”

He hums, cutting you off a second time. “It wouldn’t be very convincing if I let them win, would it? You might have caught on. I let them track us, let them get close, gave them information, but I refused to let them just barge in and attempt to take the Lions by force. We were doing this mission  _ my _ way.”

He smiles now, a full grin that shows nearly all of his teeth, bared as if ready to rip into your throat.

“And look how well it all worked out for me.”

You don’t think about it as you pull the trigger of your gun, aimed straight for Keith’s chest.

He’s faster than you’d thought he’d be, and he rolls with no problem to avoid it. You forgot for a moment that  _ you’re _ the injured one, not him, and it’s made vastly apparent as he shifts his weight halfway through the roll and kicks off of the ground, lunging across the space between the two of you. You attempt to scramble backwards, but fail -- he slams into you before you can move, his shoulder colliding with your chest, sending your bayard flying.

You slide across the floor of the training room, the screech from your armor on the floor ringing in your ears through the pain in your chest. You scramble to get up, but Keith is there again, one leg thrown over your torso as he rests on one of his knees. He pulls you up by the collar of your suit, rearing back a fist to hit you in the face.

You catch his hand as it falls forward, pushing his arm back as far as you can before throwing all of your weight into a roll to your left. You roll straight into the leg Keith is using to hold himself up, and you can hear him grunt as it gives out beneath him. You kick at the floor, flipping yourself as much as possible so that you end up on Keith’s back, twisting one arm into his torso as your other hand weaves into his hair. You grip, hard, pulling his head back to slam it into the floor.

You pull it back, tears blurring your vision, and you can hear screaming and laughter and you can’t think of anything other than  _ hurting Keith hurt Keith Keith hurt them so you hurt Keith _ -

You slam his face into the floor again, and when you pull him back up you can see the blood falling from his nose, his lip, his mouth from where one of his has teeth chipped. You pause, breathing heavily, tears falling onto the back of your hand where it continues to grip Keith’s hair. Your hands shake, your legs shake, everything shakes as you stare at the blood pooling on the floor beneath you. Keith’s head is turned sideways in your grip, and you can see him smiling.

“Are you done?”

You slam him into the floor for the 7th time.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you wonder how durable the Galra people are, and whether you can get away with a few more shoves. But a larger part of you shuts down as you stare down at the person who had once undeniably been  _ Keith _ , and you can’t bring yourself to do it again.

You do, however, sit on his back, pushing his face into the floor to hold him steady.

“Did you mean any of it?”

Keith hums, a thoughtful noise. It’s the one he would make in bed with you, curled up under the blankets in the middle of the night as you talked, his head on your chest as you played with his hair. He hums like this, and for a minute you’re there with him in bed, instead of lying in a pool of his blood on the training room floor.

“You were the one thing I never lied about.”

The words hit you like a freight train, and you loosen your grip on his hair.

It’s the only opening Keith needs.

He rears his head, rolling onto his back and flipping you with ease. He settles onto your hips, grinning down at you from above. You think of all of the times you’ve seen him like this, above you, a smile on his face as he settled on your hips and took you apart and put you back together night after night.

This time, though, he stares down at you with cool intent, his blood dripping down the cheek that had been flush to the tile, falling out of his mouth and down his chin, landing on the chest plate of your armor.

He hums again as he rests his palm against it, smearing so that your blue blends with his red. You wonder if it looks purple from where he sits.

You wonder if it looks like  _ his _ purple.

He’s humming some song that you don’t know, staring down at you as if you’re the only thing that matters on this side of the universe. He pulls out his knife, the one you’ve seen him use a million times before, and presses the tip to your jugular.

You realize that you’re going to die.

You realize that you’re going to die at the hands of Keith.

You think that maybe it’s better this way.

You think that maybe, if you’d been allowed to live, you wouldn’t have been able to live much at all after everything that’s happened.

Keith presses the knife a bit harder, though you can’t feel any pain. He smiles down at you.

“I love you, Lance.”

And as he slices your throat completely, you realize that you loved him, too.

**Author's Note:**

> /whispers/  
> Happy birthday Mark, like a month later~


End file.
